


Workplace Relationship

by badly_knitted



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: fic_promptly, Dating, Drama, Established Relationship, Fluff, Introspection, M/M, Rift (Torchwood), Rift Gifts, Romance, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24076573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badly_knitted/pseuds/badly_knitted
Summary: Being in a workplace relationship has both good and bad points.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Comments: 4
Kudos: 37
Collections: fic_promptly Fills 2018





	Workplace Relationship

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my own prompt ‘Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, Dating the boss has its downside,’ at fic_promptly.

People said you should never date your boss, because it complicated everything. For one thing, if you did get involved with you boss and then the two of you broke up, you could find yourself fired as well. The general opinion was that work and relationships didn’t mix and should always be kept separate… 

That was all very well, but working for Torchwood didn’t leave much room for a social life anyway; it was hard to find the time to get out there and meet someone, and since Torchwood agents weren’t permitted to talk to outsiders about their work… Well, not everyone was going to be understanding about being shut out of a major part of their partner’s life.

Ianto hadn’t planned to get involved with his boss anyway, he’d only intended to work for Torchwood Three until Lisa was healed, then take off with her for parts unknown and hope Torchwood never caught up with them. But Jack had been persistent, and Ianto had needed to keep him from discovering Lisa, and then Lisa had… died and been executed. Ianto preferred to think of it in that order; what had been Lisa had passed away, and what took her place had then needed to be killed before it could kill anyone else.

After all that, Jack had surprisingly been there for him, offering support and cautious friendship. Over time they’d grown close again, and now, since Jack had returned from his time with the Doctor, they were officially dating, which had taken him a bit by surprise.

Ianto didn’t think them being together was necessarily a bad thing. They could talk about work if they wanted to, they didn’t have to hide anything from each other, there were no awkward explanations for why he had to leave suddenly in the middle of a date, or in the middle of the night… They both already knew.

But there were inevitable downsides too; they were never off duty, date nights were frequently interrupted by work emergencies, and the whole team knew about it if they’d had an argument. With only five team members, keeping anything secret from each other was difficult, although they tried their best; in Ianto’s opinion private lives were best kept private if at all possible. What they did on their own time was nobody’s business but their own.

To complicate matters even further, Jack technically lived at their workplace, so most times when Ianto spent the night with his lover it was in Jack’s bunker under his office… Keeping their work lives and their relationship separate in any way whatsoever was a pipe dream.

Tonight they’d actually managed to not only go out for dinner but get through the whole meal, including dessert, without being interrupted once. That was an almost unheard of event worthy of celebration, so they’d decided to go back to Ianto’s little house and celebrate in style, making the most of Ianto’s big, comfy double bed. Needless to say, they hadn’t got there; a Rift alert just after they left the restaurant had sent them in the opposite direction to deal with a mysterious object than had been dumped in the wilds of Splott and when they’d arrived to retrieve it, they’d discovered that it was turning everything it touched into glass, including several pieces of litter, the patch of concrete it had landed on, and an inquisitive rat.

So here they were, date night once again cut short, and stuck with the problem of how to deal with the mysterious object without it turning the whole of Cardiff, including the inhabitants, into pretty glass figurines. Just another typically Torchwood problem, and like always they were able to solve it with a bit of experimentation and ingenuity.

Having turned a cardboard box into a glass container by touching the device with it, they nudged the latest arrival into the box using a piece of wood, which immediately turned into glass, popped that and the other glass objects, including the rat, in with the device, and headed back to the Hub.

Thankfully, items transformed by this particular piece of alien tech didn’t have the power to turn other things into glass otherwise the problem might have been a whole lot worse. Jack was still Jack, and not a life-size glass ornament, despite carrying everything back to the SUV, and Torchwood’s official vehicle also remained in its usual metallic state. It certainly beat the time they’d wound up naked on a bitterly cold night after everything they’d been wearing got dissolved. That had been one of their less successful dates since they’d then been arrested for public indecency.

One thing was for certain; a night out with Jack was never predictable. Ianto literally never knew what might happen next. He suspected that after Jack, dating anyone else would just be boring; he’d grown accustomed to the weirdness that was his life, and his relationship with Jack was a big part of that. After all, what else could he expect from dating an immortal who’d been born on another planet several thousand years in the future?

But who wanted a normal life anyway? Once upon a time a normal life had been all Ianto had wanted; these days, in his considered opinion normality was vastly overrated. Dating Jack was just so much more interesting.

The End


End file.
